JD Cyr's Chrono Trigger ASCII art is a work of, well, art (and if you like this, you'll enjoy Toby Goldstone's Quake FAQ header art, too). In a similar vein, well done to Jeremy Martin, who gave his Day Of The Tentacle walkthrough a header with a tentacle in it. This Final Fantasy VII one has a very similar energy. Alice0 also liked the use of ASCII art to make a cursive handwriting style title for the table of contents.īig fan of this one by Iron Knuckle because it makes The Curse Of Monkey Island look like a spin-off from The Fast And The Furious, possibly fronted by Zac Efron, rather than a point and click adventure about pirates. This, from ChandooG's Metal Gear Solid guide, is simple and classic, but I especially enjoy the inclusion of 'A Hideo Kojima masterpiece.'. The use of negative space to form the '2' is a genius touch. I'm a big fan of the use of upper and lower case for this Half Life 2 logo from Greg Slomin's walkthrough. The whole first section, before you get to any guide stuff, has info about the different versions of Doom and recent patches, the staff at iD, and what makes Doom different from Wolfenstein 3D.) It even represents the colour change on the letters! (As a side note, you can learn a lot about Doom from reading this FAQ. It is a gift that we are still able to see it. This FAQ is by Hank Leukart and was last updated in 1994. Let's start with a classic game for a classic artistic medium, with some ASCII title art for Doom and Doom II. I do recommend you actually click through to look at the guides in their original format, not only because image compression mangles the crisp edges of the ASCII art a bit, but also because the guides themselves are often a joy. :Dīack in the before times, before you could easily splash actual images onto the internet, ASCII art was a way to make your guides purdy to look at, and many guides writers really rose to this challenge. Example: I can make an ASCII smiley face. A true craft that has died out but deserves to be seen and celebrated.ĪSCII basically just means 'the standard way of displaying text on your computer screen', but since humans are an enterprising lot, we have long used it to represent more than just display text. And the true marker of the dedication of these artisans can be seen in one thing: the ASCII art of game titles they put in at the top of their work. You reached out to me, guides writers, and you never even knew it. I used to sit up reading these in the 90s and 00s, a little goblin who wasn't yet good enough to complete these games without help. Go to sites like NeoSeeker and GameFAQs and you can still see their work preserved, their beautiful HTML formatting, and their instructions on the precise font and size you should view the guide in (or it would mess up the formatting and ruin all the work they put into the contents lists). Instead, they were written for free by absolute heroes who toiled away for months on end, updating their guides to new versions until they had cleared it to 100% and documented everything, entirely in their spare time. Back in the old days (10+ years ago), guides weren't a thing that websites had a dedicated writing team for.
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